Nothing Today Comes Close ‘Batman ‘66’s’ Sweaty Super Slugfests

Even if a superhero movie has dull characters or an eye roll-inducing plot, you can usually take solace in the fact that you’re gonna see super-beings slug it out. If it ain’t gonna deliver on the heart, then at least deliver on the spectacle, ya know? Superhero fights have come a long way even in the last 18 years. Just compare the point-and-blast combat of 2000’s X-Men to the all-hands-on-deck dazzling super-teamwork choreography of this year’s Avengers: Infinity War. The ante, it has been upped considerably.

But as much as I love a good super-brawl (I am not at all ashamed to admit that I freaked the F out during the Black Widow/Okoye/Scarlet Witch vs. Proxima Midnight moment in Infinity War, because you freaked out too), I have to give it up to the OG of heroic slugfests: Batman ’66. In honor of the late Adam West’s birthday, it’s time we gave these technicolor showdowns their due!

The original Batman TV show ran for three seasons, bringing Bat-action to small screens twice a week from 1966 to 1968. And viewers could be assured that at least once an episode, all hell would break lose.

It’s always Batman and Robin (Burt Ward) slugging it out against a dozen goons, swinging haymakers and hurling themselves off of crates like spandex-covered anvils. These fights are sloppy, chaotic, sluggish, and ridiculously entertaining to watch.

That’s because they feel real. You ever see a real fight? They’re ugly and always more of a taekwondon’t than a taekwondo. The highly-choreographed martial arts melees of new superhero movies and TV shows are adrenaline-fueled affairs, sure, but they’re essentially dances with with more blood and grunts. The skirmishes on Batman, though, are just pure mayhem.

None of the henchmen are black belts, and honestly I bet Logan-era Hugh Jackman is way more ripped than everyone involved in these fights combined. But that doesn’t matter. These fights are a bunch of middle-aged men (and Burt Ward) huffing and puffing their way through fisticuffs, giving it all they got before getting konked on the head with an umbrella or vase or Bat-something-or-other. And because this is 1966, the stunts seem even wilder. There’s no CG here, and no digitally-erased wires. When Adam West and Burt Ward jump from up high into a pile of thugs, they’re actually doing that. These fights just look exhausting, like real fights should!

Ya also gotta give it up to how these fights were shot. A persistent problem with modern fight scenes, even the best ones, is that they are edited into hundreds of quick, millisecond cuts and shot from so close up that you can never tell what anyone is doing. That’s not the case here! The fights spill out into super wide shots where you can see every single sweaty man running around, swinging their meathooks. In a way, isn’t it more impressive that they got that many grown men to play this intense of pretend all at once?

Of course I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the sound effects, the colorful, CRRAACK!s, CRUNCH!es, BONK!s, RAKK!s, and OOOFF!s that punctuate half of the blows for added comic book effect. Who cares if 90% of those sound effects don’t make sense (since when did a punch sound like ZAP!?)? They add impact and make these rowdy and real fight scenes seem a bit more heightened.